10 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 1h \ on: CE003: Centralization Risk bitcoin
Does Voskuil really say pooling is the risk wrt mining? I'd say that mining centralization is a big concern, but pooling is the least of it.
221 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 1h \ parent \ on: What show deserves a deep discussion first? Entertainment
I can't remember how it all shook out, but what stands out in my mind is some of the smartest treatment of the relationship between the individual and the group that I've ever seen anywhere. That, more than how much I like it as a show (which is A LOT) is why I suggested it.
I do remember not loving the very end, but I rarely do.
Sendhil Mullainathan's work (the guy from the Harvard article) is really interesting; his book on the topic is pretty mind-blowing, even though there have been some issues w/ replication.
Even so the central idea, that scarcity of important things configures a person in a certain way, is one of the most consequential in all of science, as far as I'm concerned.
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 8h \ parent \ on: Show, Not Tell, What You Know BooksAndArticles
Use strong nouns and verbs. Avoid adjectives.
Yeah, it's a fine line indeed.
The other nitpicky hill that I'll die on is "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Absence of evidence absolutely and irrefutably IS evidence of absence. It is not, however, proof of absence.
96% of human kind seems incapable of appreciating nuance -- they run from one shitty take to the equivalent shitty take at the other end of the spectrum. This is why I am chronically miserable.
It's not a logical fallacy unless they are making claims like "it can't get worse than the worst it's ever been." The past is a good guide to the future, most of the time. But it's worth actually considering what the methodology does and does not guarantee, that's for sure.
Thanks for the reply.
What about this hypothetical scenario: major governments stop being adversarial to btc. Tax law changes s.t. buying coffee is no longer taxable event. Now people can use it for MoE if they wanted.
I take your comment to mean:
a) nobody really wants that, so scaling isn't an issue and won't be an issue in any conceivable near-term
b) if they did start to want that, there would be a variety of signals, including upticks in self-custody and demand for blockspace
If b) happened, would you then believe that scaling shortcomings were inevitable and needed to be solved, by something like PS's proposal, or something else, and it could be handled at that time? Or are you saying that even in that case, existing infrastructure is up to the task?
In other words, I'm trying to figure out if your principal objection is timing (it's not a problem yet, it's more harm than good to pre-solve it) or something more foundational.
to saying we must scale at all costs, despite a preponderance of counter-evidence
I dunno what "at all costs" means concretely, and I don't what preponderance of counter-evidence you're referring to. Can you expand?
Things like BIP300 are cool but they'll only be run when other L2s have actually failed
I'm not enough of an insider to opine on specifics, but my vague take is that btc is dominated by two extrema:
a) circlejerking maxis shouting as loud as they can that everything is fine and will always be fine, and any suggestion that something could be a serious problem (e.g., dwindling block reward) is met w/ accusations of shitcoinery and even less coherent replies because btc is inevitable
b) doomsayers who never shut up about how obviously nothing can ever work, and any argument that it's working now is a delusion
Both camps are tedious to me, but I dislike the first camp more, because the second camp is trivially refutable, and thus harmless. The first camp could be an existential risk. I appreciate PS for offering concrete diagnoses and proposals.
I think Americans are used to seeing people arrested for bullshit technicalities and thrown in jail for long periods of time. But in the rest of the world, it is quite uncommon. For a non-US Bitcoin entrepreneur, the US is a scary and dangerous place. American authorities seem resourceful, competent, and motivated to destroy your life just to prove a point. This line of thinking is not paranoia, nor is it cowardice.
Good article. The silver lining is that perhaps @k00b is in the process of getting his wish.
1010 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 2 May \ parent \ on: Bitcoin paradigm shift thought experiment bitcoin
I think the best possible scenario for bitcoin is it's severely and progressively attacked and we anticipate and adapt to survive it. The worst possible scenario is bitcoin isn't attacked, becomes ubiquitous, and is only then attacked and more people suffer a loss from it.
I had an answer like this in mind, but not as elegant as the way you've put it. I had imagined it as a basketball metaphor:
Think of btc as a team in the NBA at the beginning of the season. The best thing that could happen is if the team faced enough adversity that they were forced to suffer, to scramble, to fight with each other and figure out who to be, but not so much adversity that they were torn apart by it and fell into learned helplessness.
Over the course of the season they slowly improved, with many ups and downs, but got on a run before the playoffs -- they started really putting it together. In the playoffs, every series was close, but high variance -- they won big and they lost big. They faced elimination. They had to manage euphoria. They made adjustments. Round 1 demanded a somewhat different approach than round 2. Different heroes emerged each series. The players grew and evolved and adapted.
They win the title in the end, exhausted but jubilant.
For instance, the steam engine was invented in the early 1700's and it took almost a hundred years for it to be adopted at a transformative scale.
Yes. And think how obvious the benefits of the steam engine were, vs btc, solving a problem that many people in the West don't even think they have, whose most vocal advocates are, to most people, insane, using paradigms that make no intuitive sense.
I'm astounding that things are as advanced as they are, honestly.
My sense is that the two are related. I'm a very skeptical person, and the amount of learning I had to do before any of this seemed not completely idiotic was astounding. If it takes, say, ten hours of labor before that happens, then it's not surprising at all that most people's opinions are what they are. If it takes more than ten (which it did for me) then even more so.
I'm simply not a fan of the average human being, which has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
In my experience people are both better and worse than are commonly believed. Sometimes I'm blown away by what humanity is capable of, and sometimes I feel like if we were all wiped out it would be broadly good for the larger universe in every way that really matters.
Those two views are hard to hold in your head without going mad, admittedly.
We're fifteen years in and the overwhelming majority still thinks it's a scam, if that ain't telling you something about the average Joe, then what?
Here's how I think of it: btc is such a giant mindfuck on so many levels. The amount of foreign ideas that upend other things is staggering. It's cliche to say that you can think about it and read about it for years and still not be close to exhausting it, but that's been true for me. Seven-ish years of reading and thinking and it's still really weird. This thread in one of the book club discussions elaborates on this. This one also seems relevant.